


The One with the OT3

by dragonmorph



Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Genre: (I mean maybe not Cassie but sure why not), 16-year-olds having off-screen sex, Canon-Typical Violence, Cassie has wiles, Marco makes bad decisions, Multi, everyone is bi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-26
Updated: 2020-06-26
Packaged: 2021-03-03 21:54:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24932587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dragonmorph/pseuds/dragonmorph
Summary: Cassie looked at her hands. "I know that if the person I had a crush on started dating one of my friends—”I choked on my bite of mystery meat. “What the hell? I don’t have a crush.”
Relationships: Jake Berenson/Cassie (Animorphs), Jake Berenson/Cassie/Marco, background Rachel/Tobias - Relationship
Comments: 15
Kudos: 57





	The One with the OT3

**Author's Note:**

  * For [caballo_de_abdera](https://archiveofourown.org/users/caballo_de_abdera/gifts).



> Happy birthday! Have an OT3. :D
> 
> This takes place at an unspecified point late in canon but before the endgame. For anyone who might be squicked out: the kids are 16, and sex is had but not onscreen. Do with that what you will!
> 
> (Also I blame [the podcast](https://www.animorphology.com) for everything)

My name is Marco.

You don’t need to know my last name. You don’t need to know where I live. What you need to know about me is that I am cool.

Suave. Smooth. Debonair. Ask anyone. The girls at school, definitely. I mean, a few of them might have gotten the wrong impression over the years, but most of them will tell you: Marco is one cool cat.

Which is why it wasn’t weird that I stopped by Cassie’s house that night. See, cool people don’t do weird things. I am a cool person. Q.E.D., as my Geometry teacher would say: not weird.

Of course, it might have been a little more normal if I hadn’t been a bird of prey at the time.

Maybe I should back up.

There are these evil aliens called the Yeerks. They're invading Earth. This other non-evil alien called an Andalite gave me and four of my friends the power to morph into animals so that we could fight them. Now we spend most of our time running around after the Yeerks, mostly fearing for our lives and screaming and trying not to die. It’s basically what any kid hopes for from their high school years.

Tonight, fortunately, we weren’t fighting aliens. We’d done a lot of it lately, and Jake—he’s pretty much in charge, or at least we let him think he is—had decided we needed some time off. Historically this kind of break had not gone well for us. But it had been a whole twenty-four hours and no screaming chaos had erupted, so I was prepared to call it good.

On the other hand, that meant I was running out of excuses not to do my three-week backlog of math homework.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t need an excuse not to do math homework. Homework procrastination is an innate gift. But I was bored. The cable was out, and the cord that connected the PlayStation to the TV had gone missing. Mysteriously. Possibly having to do with Nora, my stepmother and former math teacher.

Yeah. You think _your_ parents are intense about your math grade.

Anyway, so I had limited options. I could stay home and do math homework. I could stay home and play with Euclid, the toy poodle from hell. Or I could try to get one of the others to hang out.

I know, I know, pretty pathetic. I couldn’t make it more than twenty-four hours without hanging out with the people I saw every day. But I’m not sure you understand just how annoying Euclid is. In any incarnation.

I grabbed the phone and dialed the number I’ve had memorized for as long as I’ve had my own.

Jake’s mom answered, and I prepared myself to lie to her about why I was calling. Then I realized I didn’t have to: I wasn’t secretly trying to signal to Jake that we had to meet up to fight Yeerks. I was actually just calling to hang out. Weird.

“Hi, Mrs. Berenson,” I said. “Is Jake there?”

“Sorry, Marco, you just missed him,” she said. “He went over to Cassie’s half an hour ago.”

Cassie’s. Yeah, that figured.

Jake’s had a pretty obvious thing for Cassie for years. Well, obvious to me, his best friend. And to anyone else who can pick up on subtle things like blushing and stumbling over words and not being able to make eye contact. The whole Animorphs thing had really put a dent in the stumbling over words aspect of things, but it hadn’t made the crush go away. And lately it had seemed like it was more than a crush—like maybe they’d figured out how to talk to each other about it, and now there was an actual thing happening.

Which was great. Really, it was. No one wants his best friend to be too much of a wimp to make a move on the girl he’s been crushing on for years. But it meant that best-friend time had been seriously diminished. And that’s not even taking into account the thing where we were spending most of our time trying to fight back an alien invasion of Earth.

I ran through my other options for the evening. It was after dark, which meant Tobias was probably asleep on a tree branch somewhere. Ax, our resident TV-obsessed alien, had been on a National Geographic kick lately, which meant his scoop was out unless I felt like hearing about the mating habits of prairie dogs. Again. And Rachel…well, I could try going over to Rachel’s, but I gave it three minutes tops before I’d be out on my ear.

So really, Jake and Cassie were my only option. And Jake’s mom had just said he was going over to Cassie’s. She hadn’t said they were on a _date_. If two friends were hanging out, a third could join them, right? Totally legit.

Anyway, I was sure that once Jake heard what my options had been, he’d see that I had no choice.

I morphed osprey and flew over to Cassie’s house. The obvious, polite thing to do next was land, demorph, and go ring her doorbell. But there was a chance her parents would answer. We can’t really morph normal clothing: just skintight stuff, like tank tops and exercise shorts. So her parents would answer the door to see a barefoot half-dressed Marco looking like he was ready for Jazzercise class. Not the kind of person you hope your kid will be hanging out with on a school night. Or maybe ever.

Instead I stayed in osprey morph and buzzed the house. Nothing. The windows were all dark, no lights on inside.

Well, that was weird. Weren’t Jake and Cassie supposed to be over here?

Maybe something had happened to them. Yeah, that was a good enough reason to stay and investigate.

I landed in the woods behind Cassie’s house. Three minutes later, I lifted off again on different wings, these ones silent as the night.

Osprey don’t see that well at night. Maybe as well as a human, but honestly, humans are pretty useless at night. Owls, though? To the owl, the whole world might as well have been lit with a spotlight.

I buzzed the house again. With the owl’s eyes, the dark windows were lit up like the Christmas displays on Fifth Avenue. Couch. TV. Novel with pages dog-eared. Someone in Cassie’s house was reading Tom Clancy. Good choice.

I flew by Cassie’s window, above the garage, and did a double take.

The osprey eyes hadn’t seen anything in Cassie’s room. The owl eyes painted a whole different picture. Specifically, a picture of Jake and Cassie. Doing exactly what you’d expect two people who were dating to be doing alone in the dark in an otherwise empty house.

I didn’t get a very good look. Not that I was trying to get a good look. But even if I’d wanted to, I couldn’t have, because approximately half a second later I crashed smack into a weather vane and fell onto the garage roof.

<Motherfucker!> I shouted. In thought-speak, of course—that’s the only way we can speak in morph. But I broadcast that thought-speak far and wide. Mice two fields over were going to know how much this hurt.

From inside the window came a hasty series of thumps, like two people falling out of bed. A moment later the window slid up.

“Marco?” Cassie said.

I thought about lying. Or pretending to be dead. Maybe I could roll off the side of the roof. My wing was probably still good enough to keep me from face-planting on the ground. Even if it was broken, which it certainly felt like at the moment.

<Hi,> I said weakly.

“Is that Marco on the roof?”

Oh, good. Jake was coming to see, too. That was just what I needed.

“What happened? Is it the Yeerks?” he asked.

<Ha ha,> I said. <Nope. No Yeerks here. Just, uh, coming to see what you guys were up to. Wow, you’d think those weather vanes would have reflective tape on them or something, wouldn’t you?>

“Did you hurt your wing?” Cassie asked.

<What, this old thing?> I held my wing up. Or tried to. <No worries, I’ll just morph out. You guys, uh, go back to whatever you were doing.>

There was an awkward silence. Cassie and Jake didn’t look at each other. I didn’t look at them. Definitely not at Jake’s shirtless chest, or the way Cassie was pretty much only wearing a sheet.

Maybe I should have gone with the rolling-off-the-roof plan.

“Uh, so,” Jake said, after the silence had gone from uncomfortable to unbearable and settled there for a while. “Did you, uh. Did you want to come in?”

<Nope! I’m just leaving! We’re all good! I’ll see you tomorrow!> I said, spreading my wings to take off.

“Marco,” Cassie said, “I think your wing is—”

<Nope it’s fine!> I said. I made it around the corner of the house, wobbling painfully, and then fell to the ground in the least graceful landing any owl has ever had.

I lay there in mute agony for a few moments before starting to demorph. At which point I should have felt a lot better. And I did, I guess. I was just never going to be able to show my face to any of the other Animorphs, ever.

“Well,” I said out loud, “that’s one way to get out of this war.”

***

Unfortunately, I couldn’t get out of going to school the next day. Parents don’t tend to accept “potentially fatal levels of embarrassment” as an excuse for staying home. Believe me, I’ve tried.

. It’s a subtle art, of which I am the master. You won’t catch me spending one more second in the school building than I have to.

Cassie was in my first-period Chemistry class. I skirted danger by showing up exactly two seconds before the final bell and not making eye contact. It’s our policy as Animorphs, anyway: we try not to seem like we’re too much of a group at school. You know, so if the Yeerks capture one of us and somehow don’t infest us and get all our secrets, the others might still be able to escape.

It’s a solid life-saving strategy. I employed it real hard. I listened to Mrs. Stetson harder than I’ve ever listened to any other lecture on the Krebs cycle in my life.

I had my things packed by five minutes before the end of the period. The second the bell rang, I was out the door and running for my life.

I made it to second period and took a breather. No Animorphs this period; just hard-to-conjugate Spanish verbs.

It was third period I was really worried about.

See, Cassie was just the first pass. The opening combat. That first level they give you in video games so you can figure out how the controls work before you face the real enemies. Cassie has some tact. Some grace. Some ability to behave like a mature person in awkward situations, which neither Jake nor I has ever been very good at.

Most importantly, Cassie doesn’t sit next to me at the back of the classroom and, nine times out of ten, fall asleep on top of me.

Not actually on top of me, obviously. I do have some survival instincts. I know how it would look for two guys to sleep on top of each other in a public classroom. But one or the other of us always falls asleep at this point in the morning, especially if the lecture on Transcendentalist poets is drier than usual, or we were up all night fighting Yeerks. Then the other person has to do the poking awake, and after class there’s the cobbling together of notes to try to figure out if Mr. Zagorski said anything that’s going to show up on a test. It’s a time-honored system.

Jake was already in his seat when I got to the classroom. I briefly contemplated stealing someone else’s seat or maybe just diving out the window. Who needed to know about the Transcendentalist poets, anyway?

I went to my usual seat. Kids get weird if you try to change seats on them, and sometimes they get loud. The last thing I wanted this morning was someone being loud about how I wasn’t sitting next to Jake.

Jake sort of looked at me as I sat down. At least, his eyes got halfway over to me, and then they wised up and ran in the other direction. He mumbled something that also seemed to change its mind before it made its way properly out of his mouth.

I kept my eyes on the back wall. Tripped over the leg of my desk. Finally managed to slide into my seat, in a move that probably almost looked cool. If you had your eyes closed.

Class that day was approximately five thousand minutes long. At least I didn’t have to worry about falling asleep. Nothing for your alertness levels like truly mortifying degrees of embarrassment.

Jake seemed pretty frozen, too. I managed not to look at him for most of Mr. Zagorski’s long-winded talk on metric foot. I didn’t need to look; the look I’d gotten last night was burned pretty well into my retinas. But it’s hard to avoid looking at someone for so long without your eyes getting ideas of their own and trying to wander over.

I risked a glance. He was blushing.

I jerked my eyes back to my notebook. _Don’t think about the way he looked last night don’t think about it._

I hadn’t seen that much last night. But what I’d seen had been…a lot. I’d also seen it a lot more times, every time I’d closed my eyes last night to try to sleep. There they were, Jake and Cassie, in positions I never thought I’d see them in.

I fell halfway out of my seat when the bell rang. For once, not because I’d been asleep. And then I realized my mistake: I’d been so focused on not thinking for all of class that I hadn’t thought about what was coming next: lunch.

I said before that the Animorphs try to stay separate at school. That doesn’t apply to me and Jake. We’ve been best friends since before either of us even put on a backpack. It would be weirder if we _didn’t_ hang out. And hanging out, in high school, means eating lunch together. It’s not even an optional thing. Like, you have the same lunch period as your friends, you eat with them. There’s no other choice.

There was a frozen moment where both Jake and I stood by our desks, paralyzed by the presumably mutual realization of what was facing us. Thirty-plus minutes of sitting across from each other and trying to look anywhere but at each other’s faces. Made you feel downright good about the cafeteria food, in comparison.

“So,” Jake said, just when I was contemplating developing a life-threatening hangnail that would require me to be carried out of school on a stretcher. “I think I’m gonna head to the library. I have that…history project.”

“Great!” I said, way too loudly. “I mean, that sucks, obviously. Homework. The worst, right? Okay, so I’ll see you later!”

Like I said: smooth.

Normally sitting alone in the cafeteria is cause for humiliation, awkwardness, the development of sudden fascination with reading the print on the back of your milk carton. Today, it was bliss. Even the first bite of mystery meat couldn’t dampen my mood. I was free; I was clear; I had an entire half hour of not having to avoid anyone’s eyes.

That was when Cassie sat down at my table.

I stared at her. She wasn’t supposed to be here. She was supposed to be across the cafeteria, with Rachel, pretending she barely knew me. Not here, making my throat do this thing where it closed up around the piece of meat it was trying to swallow.

“Hi, Marco,” she said, picking up her knife and fork.

I had half a moment of hope. Cassie was the mature one. She was probably here to make things normal again. I could do normal. I would just…be normal without looking at her face. Yeah.

“I wanted to come talk to you,” she said. “I thought you might be feeling weird about last night.”

There went my hope. Bye, hope. Maybe you can share a grave with my dignity.

“Weird?” I said, my voice getting high and squeaky. “Why would I be weird?”

Cassie laughed. “Jake asked me to check on you, actually,” she said. “He feels pretty bad about things.”

“Yeah, well, he should,” I mumbled.

“Really?” Cassie asked. “Do you think so?”

Her voice was gentle. All of my danger alerts went off. “Hey, traumatized victim, here,” I said. “Did you know you’re not even supposed to scrub your eyes out with soap? I know. News to me, too.”

Cassie just kept looking at me with an understanding expression.

I remembered that I wasn’t supposed to be looking at her face. “Anyway, it’s over,” I said brightly. “So, how about that Krebs cycle? Wacky how it keeps on turning and turning, right?”

“It’s okay to be upset about it,” Cassie said.

“Well, it provides all aerobic life with its energy, so actually I’ve been feeling pretty okay about it.”

“Marco,” Cassie said. “You don’t have to pretend to be okay with this. I know it’s probably tough to see us together.”

I laughed. It was not a very happy laugh. “Cassie. We are—” I looked around and lowered my voice. “We are _fighting aliens_ full-time now. I’m upset about how all my friends are maybe going to die. I’m upset that the last time I saw my mom, I had to choose to give her back to the people that enslaved her because the alternative was open war for all of humanity. On the list of things I’m upset about, you and Jake don’t even rank.”

“You are upset about it, though,” she said.

That’s the thing about talking to Cassie. You’ll be making some perfectly valid point and she’ll somehow come back around to the exact opposite of what you were trying to say. “I’m not _upset_ ,” I said. “Why would I be upset?”

“I’m sorry,” she said, looking at her hands. “I know I’m not the right person for you to talk to about this. I just really think you should talk to someone. I know that if the person I had a crush on started dating one of my friends—”

I choked on my bite of mystery meat. Cassie reached over like she was going to help, but I waved her away. I coughed for like thirty seconds and then wiped my streaming eyes with a napkin. “What the hell? I don’t have a crush,” I croaked out.

“I know how much Jake means to you,” Cassie said quietly. “I don’t want this to make it hard for you to be around him.”

“And maybe it will, because I have seen things I can’t unsee,” I said. “But that has nothing to do with a crush because _I don’t have one_.”

She didn’t look convinced. She looked like she was having pangs of guilt about my poor tender feelings. I sighed.

“Look, Cassie,” I said. “We’ve been friends for a long time. Obviously. But that’s all it is. Do I have a crush on Tobias? Do I have a crush on Rachel? Of course not, because I’m perfectly capable of being friends with someone without having a crush on them! So will you please believe me when I say I don’t have a crush on Jake?”

Something passed over her face, like a flash of understanding. “What?” I said.

“Nothing.” She bit her lip. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t sure.”

“About…whether or not I had a crush on Jake?”

She reached out and put her hand on top of mine. “I’m so sorry.”

I narrowed my eyes at her. “Okay, you heard what I said, right? About how I _don’t_ have a crush?”

“I should go.” She took her hand away from mine and stood up. “I won’t tell anyone, okay?”

“What, about my crush that doesn’t exist?” I said, but she was already disappearing.

“What the hell,” I said to my mound of mashed potatoes. As far as conversationalists went, at least they were easier to talk to than Cassie.

***

I was pretty distracted the rest of the day. Turns out it’s hard to get it out of your head when someone accuses you of having a crush on your best friend.

Like I said, Jake and I have been friends for years. We were in the same kindergarten class. One time in class I made a joke and Jake laughed so hard he threw up all over the paper kite he was making and had to have his dad pick him up from school.

I made the same joke the next day. He still laughed.

We’ve been through a lot together. And not just the playground wars in second grade. He was probably the reason I made it through after my mom disappeared. Not that he said a lot—he just kept showing up, day after day, even on the days when I was too down to do more than lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling. I wasn’t very funny on those days. Jake came around anyway.

The point is, he meant a lot to me, even before we started fighting aliens together. I would die for the guy, okay? And I was happy when he got together with Cassie. Obviously. When a guy is that good a friend to you, you’re happy when something makes him happy. And Cassie was great. Except for the thing where she came up with weird theories about me having a crush on my best friend.

Why did she think that? Was I giving off vibes or something?

I was pretty sure I wasn’t. But it was enough to make me uncomfortable when the six of us met in Cassie’s barn after school.

Tobias had asked for the meeting. Something about the free Hork-Bajir. I wasn’t paying a lot of attention, to be honest. I was more focused on whether I had accidentally taped a sign to my forehead that said “GAY FOR MY BEST FRIEND.”

I tried to look at Jake as little as possible, considering that he was leading the meeting. But maybe I was looking at him too little? Maybe Cassie thought I was overcompensating?

I snuck a look at Jake. Tobias was talking, so Jake was just sitting there, looking normal. Jake-like. He pretty much has your standard white-boy look: strong jaw, straight nose, the kind of eyes that say, “Vote for me, I probably won’t spend all your money on prostitutes and drugs.” And because it’s Jake, you know he would actually mean that. He’s a person who takes his responsibilities seriously. I could see, under his eyes, the shadows of all the sleepless nights he’d had since becoming leader of the Animorphs. Those hadn’t been there before all this started.

Okay, so maybe once or twice over the years I’d thought about him a little differently than you would a friend. That’s just normal, though. Everyone has weird thoughts about their friends. The kind you make yourself not think about the next morning, and you’re not going to act on them, so who cares, right? Doesn’t mean there’s anything else going on.

“Marco!” Rachel said loudly, and I startled.

“What?” I said, putting myself back onto the hay ball I’d fallen off of.

She rolled her eyes. “I said your name like ten times. What is with you today, anyway?”

I scoffed. “Nothing is with me. I’m normal. Super normal.”

“Riiiight,” she said, drawing the word out. “So what do you think of Tobias’s plan? You want to go for it?”

“Uh,” I said. “Yeah, sure. Seems like a great plan.”

<Really?> Tobias said from his place in the rafters. <What’s the first step?>

I knew exactly zero steps of this plan. “Well, morphing, obviously.”

“Yeah, okay, you have no idea what we’re talking about,” Rachel said. “You are so out of it today. Jake, get your boy in line.”

“I’m not his boy!” I yelped. Then realized they were all staring at me. “Uh. I mean.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Jake said, sounding tired. He still wasn’t looking me in the eyes. “Toby and the others have a chance to grab a few dozen more Hork-Bajir, at this Yeerk operation in the old power plant. They don’t have the numbers to subdue everyone at once, so they want us to come with them.”

“Well, that sounds like it carries a high chance of injury and death,” I said. “What could be wrong with that?”

“It’s important to Toby and the others that they free as many of their people as they can,” Cassie said. “I think we have a duty to help them.”

<In addition, it is in our self-interest to assist the free Hork-Bajir in dangerous operations,> Ax said. <Many of them are aware of our identities. It is imperative that we keep them from being recaptured by the Yeerks.>

“Great, so it sounds like we’re moving forward,” Jake said. “Tobias, you can tell Toby to start planning.”

The meeting broke up after that. Tobias headed off toward the free Hork-Bajir colony, Rachel morphing bald eagle to go with him. I would have started my own morph—beats the hell out of getting home by bicycle—but Jake grabbed my arm.

I leapt back like he’d burned me. He snatched his hand away. “Hang on a minute, I need to talk to you,” he said in an undertone.

I could feel where he’d touched me. No, I couldn’t. Cassie was just putting in my head. “What’s up?”

Jake shrugged and waited until the others were gone. “So, uh,” he said, shoving his hands in his pockets. “Cassie told me she talked to you.”

“She did, huh?” I said. I would have been worried, except that it was Cassie. If there was anyone who was going to keep a promise, even when it would be better not to, it was Cassie.

“Yeah, I just wanted to make sure you knew there wasn’t any pressure.” Jake was using his responsible-leader-of-the-Animorphs voice. His managing-the-team’s-feelings voice. “It was Cassie’s idea, and I said I was okay with it, obviously, but I don’t want you to feel weird about it.”

Okay, now I was just lost. “You…said you were okay with it.”

“Yeah, I mean.” Jake scuffed his shoe against the dusty floor of the barn, then stopped and adopted a solid pose. It seemed deliberate. “I’m not saying it’s my favorite idea in the world, but I’m not threatened by it or anything.”

“What would you be threatened by?”

Jake raised his eyes from the floor. “I don’t know, the idea of you and Cassie, maybe?”

Me and Cassie. Cassie and I hadn’t talked about that at all. What the heck had she told Jake?

“Uh,” I said, “sorry, dude. You’re gonna have to fill me in. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Now Jake looked uncertain. “Cassie told you, right? About you, uh…joining us?”

“Joining you?” I repeated. “As in…” And then my brain caught up with my ears.

Look, I’ve been a prey animal. I’ve been a prey animal with a predator above me, its wings forming a shape that familiar to my rodent brain from a thousand generations of evolution. It was approximately a hundredth as terrifying as this conversation.

I coughed a laugh. “Wow. That’s, uh…wow.”

“I just want to make sure you know you seriously don’t have to,” Jake said. His face was red. “It was just an idea Cassie had, and it’s totally cool if you don’t want to. I mean, I know she told you that. I just wanted to, uh, make sure, I guess.”

“Right,” I said, my heart beating about a million times per minute. Mice had nothing on me. “Well, that’s very nice of you. I’ll, uh, I’ll think about it, then. Bye!”

I raced out of the barn as fast as my human legs could carry me. Forget morphing. Too slow. I needed to be out of there, and I didn’t have a second to lose.

***

I wasn’t going to think about it, of course. Except, you know what you do when someone presents you with an idea so horrifying your brain recoils before the thought is finished? You think about it.

I made it four hours before I called Cassie. “Hi, Marco,” she said in the fake-casual voice we all use on the phone now that our calls are usually more about alien-related death than who asked who to the prom that week. “What’s up?”

“I hate you so much,” I said.

There was a pause on her end, then more of that casual voice. “Oh, yeah? What’s going on?”

“What the heck did you tell Jake? Why does he think you asked me to… _you know_?”

“Oh, yeah, haha, that was a good one,” she said, still in that loud fake voice. Then I heard a thud and her voice dropped. “Sorry, I had to get in my room. What’s wrong?”

“Everything is wrong!” I said. “Jake told me that the three of us were going to… _you know_!”

“Do you not want that?”

“No, I do not want that! I the opposite of want that! I am so far from wanting it, the Backstreet Boys are going to write a new song for me, called ‘I Do Not Want It That Way’! It’s going to be an international hit, that’s how much I don’t want it!”

“Oh.” Cassie sounded downcast. “Sorry, I thought you might want to explore it.”

“There’s nothing to explore!” I said. “I don’t have a—” I darted a look at my closed bedroom door and lowered my voice. “I don’t have a crush on Jake.”

“I never said you did.”

“Um, excuse me, yes, you did. In the cafeteria, approximately eight hours ago. Pretty sure I can remember back that far.”

“I never said you had a crush on Jake,” Cassie said. “I just said you had a crush. You were the one who said it was on Jake.”

“No,” I said. “I was there, and I definitely remember that you said—”

I paused. What had she said, exactly? Something about how hard it must be to see the person I had a crush on start dating one of my friends, and then I’d said—

Oh. Crap.

“Okay, I am never ever playing poker with you,” I said.

“I’m sorry.” She did sound sorry. “I wasn’t trying to catch you out. I just wanted you to have a chance at what you wanted.”

“Have a chance at…” I bit my lip. What did she think, I’d been pining away for Jake? That all I wanted was for him to find out about it, so that he could abandon Cassie and leap into my arms?

“Jake would never go for it,” I said. “Even if it wasn’t for…you know. Even if he was free. He’s not interested in that kind of thing.”

“He cares about you so much,” Cassie said.

“Yeah, well, not like that.”

“You don’t know that,” she said. “He probably doesn’t know how you feel, right?”

“I still haven’t said how I feel,” I said. “Wait, what did you even tell him?”

“Oh.” Now she sounded faintly guilty. “I just told him I’d had a fantasy about a threesome.”

“Cassie!”

“I know! It was the only way I could think of to float the idea without having him suspect how you felt.”

“Maybe you _should_ learn how to play poker. You would clean up,” I said.

“I can tell him I changed my mind,” she said. “But you probably want some time to think about it.”

“Oh my God, no, this is a nightmare, why would I time to think about it?”

“Well, he did say yes,” Cassie said. “So basically, if you want to, you can have sex with Jake.”

I opened my mouth to respond. Then I stopped. Everything I might have said dried up on my tongue.

What I should have said was no. No, and Cassie probably wouldn’t bring it up again. Not for a while, anyway. I wouldn’t have to think about it anymore.

I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Nothing involving the word “no” would come out of my mouth. “I hate you _so_ much,” I said instead.

“I know,” Cassie said apologetically.

***

So there went my next night’s sleep. Which was extra unfortunate, because Tobias brought us the news the next morning that Toby and her gang were planning to make their move later that day.

“She said she could wait until we’re done with school,” Rachel said when she cornered me before gym class.

“Oh great,” I said. “That’s just so considerate. I’ll be sure to send flowers as a thank you.”

Then I had to go play forty-five minutes of volleyball. Because the universe just piles it on sometimes.

Jake didn’t show up for lunch again. This time without any explanation. I sat down at our usual table and ate my lunch, and he didn’t show up.

Why was he avoiding me? Had he guessed what I was thinking? No; his girlfriend had just proposed a threesome with the two of us. That was more than enough to make it awkward without any extra-embarrassing speculation on Jake’s part.

At least Cassie didn’t join me, either. Maybe she was off with Jake somewhere, tucked into a private corner. Talking about her fantasies for what they’d do with me. No, okay, not a great subject to think about while sitting in the middle of the lunchroom.

Rachel sidled up to me again on the way out of the lunchroom. “Do you know what’s going on with Jake and Cassie?”

“I don’t know,” I said, in a normal tone of voice. Almost. “Why would I know? They don’t tell me things.”

She gave me a narrow-eyed look. “You are seriously being so weird right now. Is something going on? Is this going to be another thing like with the poodle?”

I scoffed. “You’re one to talk. Seen any crocs lately?”

“That was three years ago,” she hissed, “and you didn’t answer my question.”

“No, Xena, it’s not going to be anything like that.” Not unless Jake and Cassie were way kinkier than I thought, anyway.

“Okay, well, let me know if you find out anything,” Rachel said. “I keep having to have lunch with Brittany and Allison. It’s getting old.”

“Yeah, I’ll be sure to give you all the juicy details,” I muttered.

I had three periods of class left before going off to risk my life against the Yeerks again. Naturally, they flew by. It felt like I’d barely zoned out at the beginning of History class when there I was, blinking at the final bell.

It’s dumb. I had so much more to dread with the mission to save the Hork-Bajir. And I did dread it—believe me, I had plenty of dread reserved for that one. It’s just that that was familiar dread. Pre-battle dread. There was also this whole extra thing where I was going to have to face Jake and Cassie.

I could just tell them no right away. Even before the battle, if I wanted to. Then I wouldn’t have to worry about what they might be thinking about me. I could just shut it all down and not have to think about it anymore. That sounded pretty good to me.

I headed across the athletic fields toward the spot in the woods where we’d planned to meet up. I pushed through the first few feet of trees, and there were Jake and Cassie, kissing.

It shouldn’t have looked like much at this point. Not enough to make me stop in my tracks, anyway. But this wasn’t some little peck: this was Cassie with her arms around Jake’s neck, his hands at her waist, both of them so lost in each other they didn’t hear me walk up. Then their mouths parted, and Jake’s mouth drifted over to whisper something in Cassie’s ear. Her face was bright, tilted up to the sky, as she listened to what he was saying.

It’s weird, feeling that many conflicting things at the same time. I wanted to hate seeing it. And part of me did: a tight, twisted part of me curled up at the sight. There was another part next to that one that erupted in panic like crows startled out of a field and made my palms start to sweat. And then there was the third part: the part that didn’t want to look away. That part of me took the sight in and let it spread like a slow wave of heat through my throat and my stomach.

I swallowed. Cleared my throat. Cleared it again and actually managed to make noise this time.

They leapt apart. “Oh! Marco,” Cassie said.

Jake made a noise. A somewhat strangled noise. He looked like he wanted to melt back into the woods and disappear.

I could tell them no right now. Let them go on kissing like that and not get in the middle of it. It would probably be a relief for them—for Jake, at least. Probably for Cassie, too. Just because she’d taken pity on me didn’t mean she actually wanted me to be a part of this thing between them. Not when the thing between them looked like that.

It would be a relief for me, too, but not in the way I wanted to believe it would be. You know how sometimes someone recommends a book or a movie or whatever to you and is like, “It’s amazing, you’ll be in tears”? Yeah,. That was how I felt looking at them kissing.

I opened my mouth to say something. Just as Rachel came crashing through the brush next to me.

“Oh, good, you’re all here,” she said. “We ready to fly?”

I shut my mouth again.

“Yes. Uh, yeah,” Jake said, coughing to clear his throat. “Bird morphs. Let’s go.”

***

It was a clusterfuck of a mission.

That almost goes without saying. At least half of our missions end up as clusterfucks. And that’s usually when it’s just the six of us, trying to sneak in somewhere and steal or sabotage or whatever. Throw in a few dozen free Hork-Bajir, plus a few dozen Hork-Bajir-Controllers they’re trying to abduct instead of just evading or fighting, and you’re basically at inevitable clusterfuck status.

The basic plan was straightforward enough. We Animorphs create a stir in front of the abandoned power plant, using recognizable battle morphs to draw everyone’s attention. Then the free Hork-Bajir sneak around the back of the crowd and start grabbing Hork-Bajir-Controllers to smuggle back to their valley. Simple, right?

There were just two things we overlooked. First, how quickly a diversion in front of a few dozen Hork-Bajir-Controllers was going to erupt into fight-for-your-life mayhem. Second, how hard it was going to be in said mayhem for us to tell the free Hork-Bajir from the Controllers.

I don’t want to be rude to the Hork-Bajir or anything. I’m sure they all look different to each other. But you know the thing where in battles back in the Middle Ages or whatever, they’d put all the soldiers from one town in the same squadron so that they’d recognize each other and be able to tell who the enemy was by process of elimination? We could really have used some of that.

It didn’t help that it was nighttime. That’s right: Toby got us there after school, then had us hide out until it was dark, so that it would be easier to grab people and smuggle them away. The woman really doesn’t understand the concept of getting homework done.

Anyway, as a result of all this, the battle ended up being way bloodier than we’d expected. For a while it was at least easy to know who to fight, because anyone who was attacking an Animorph was a Hork-Bajir-Controller. Then the free Hork-Bajir got more mixed up in it, and we were faced with the real dilemma: which of the Hork-Bajir to help and which to hurt?

<The free Hork-Bajir have rope in their hands,> Cassie said. <They’re using it to tie up the ones they capture. We can go by that.>

<Okay, that’s great, but I’m looking at two Hork-Bajir fighting each other here, and they’re both ropeless,> I said.

<Marco, behind you!>

I spun around in time to see another Hork-Bajir throw itself at me. <Well, solves that problem,> I said, ducking and throwing a gorilla-powered punch.

Unfortunately, it threw a punch right back. With its bladed tail. <Ow!> I said as it swept me backwards and cut into my lower legs. I stumbled back and…well, no way to sugarcoat it. I fell through a window.

Up until this point, we’d been on the roof of the facility. It was kind of an L-shaped thing where some parts of the roof were on a lower level than others, and there were a bunch of poles and wire and stuff extending up from the roof. Hork-Bajir were real good at climbing those, it turned out. Fortunately, so was I as a gorilla.

I was less good at falling through an open window. I groped for something to grab onto, but I was free-falling. Hopefully not to leave this world for a while, but that depended on how I landed.

I landed with a crushing thud on something really hard. Not the floor. Definitely less flat than the floor. <Oof,> I said. <Well, those _used_ to be my ribs.>

<You need a hand down there, Marco?> Rachel called.

<Nah, I think I’m good.> I was pretty much alone down here—as far as I could tell, anyway. All the sounds were from above me. I sat up, painfully, and looked around. <Uh-oh.>

I’d gotten lucky, actually. If I’d landed a few feet in any direction, I would have landed on electrical wires. They were a ton of them, coming from all different directions, all hooked up to the thing I was sitting on. It was a big metal object, taller than I was and half as long again, shaped like a sphere drawn into two points at opposite ends. I had seen something like it before, and it hadn’t been hooked up to anything—which suggested to me that it wasn’t so much taking power in as sending it out. And if it was what I thought it was, then that was really bad.

<Ladies and gentlemen,> I said to my friends up above, <we have another Kandrona.>

Rachel’s bear head appeared in the window I’d crashed a hole through. <Great. Let’s destroy it.>

<I don’t think that’s what the mission was,> Tobias said, his thought-speak coming faintly from where he was flying above.

<Screw what the mission was,> I said. <They’ve got a Kandrona rigged up to the power lines. I don’t know what they’re planning, but it can’t be good.>

<They may be planning to hijack the city’s existing power infrastructure to spread Kandrona rays to individual homes,> Ax said.

<Fuck that,> Rachel said. <Let’s take it down.>

<Rachel’s right,> Jake said. <Toby, did you hear that? We’re gonna refocus. They have a Kandrona here. We’re gonna take it out.>

I didn’t hear her response. Hork-Bajir can’t thought-speak. But either she said yes, or Rachel didn’t care enough to wait to find out, because she barreled in through the window and onto the catwalk that ran along the walls. Cassie and Jake followed her, a wolf and a tiger, and then Ax on his delicate Andalite hooves.

We were all a lot worse for the wear at this point. Rachel, Cassie, and Jake, all had blood matted in their fur, and Jake was moving with a limp. Ax must have ducked out and morphed and demorphed enough to get rid of any damage, because he was the only one who didn’t look like he’d been carved up by walking weed-wackers for the last half-hour.

It was rough. But we’d been in a lot of battles by this point. We’d gotten pretty good at hand-to-hand with Hork-Bajir. We were tired, but we had enough left in us to destroy a piddly old Kandrona.

Of course, the question was how to destroy it. <Fire?> I said.

<If I were the Yeerks, I’d make sure Kandronas were fireproof,> Cassie said.

<I can morph elephant and stomp it,> Rachel said.

<Prince Jake, if I may,> Ax said. <I do not believe the Kandrona would succumb to fire or to the well-distributed weight of Rachel’s elephant morph. However, my tail blade is non-conductive. I may be able to cut into it enough to damage it.>

<I like that,> Jake said. <Go for it, Ax.>

<You want a hand down?> I asked. I eyed up the power cords surrounding the Kandrona; not thick enough for a gorilla to swing on. I loped across the floor to the catwalk instead and started climbing the struts.

<Thank you, Marco. That would be acceptable.>

I started trotting along the catwalk towards the others. They were along one of the other sides of the room, but it was an easy run. Until I felt a searing hot pain in my foot.

<Marco!> Cassie shouted.

I stumbled and looked down. My right back foot was…gone.

Well, that wasn’t good. I was blinking down at it when I felt something cold press against the back of my head. “I suggest you all stop,” a voice said behind me—the guttural voice of a Hork-Bajir, but its diction was that of the Yeerk in its head. “Or I will shoot your friend’s head off.”

<Marco. Don’t move,> Jake said tightly.

<Let me guess,> I said. <Big guy behind me, Dracon beam pointed at my head?>

“Here’s what you will do,” the Hork-Bajir said, pressing its Dracon beam harder against my head. “You will all turn and file out the window through which you entered. You will leave this facility and not return.”

<And our friend?> Ax asked. We always try to have Ax talk to Controllers so that they don’t guess we’re not Andalites.

A pause from the Hork-Bajir. “Your friend will not die,” it said.

We all knew what that meant. <Want me to smash him?> Rachel growled.

<No,> Jake said. <If we move, Marco’s dead.>

They stood, four animals with incredible firepower among them, frozen in a weird tableau. If they moved, I was dead. If they didn’t move, I was worse than dead. And the rest of them wouldn’t be too far behind me. Any of us got infested, and our secret would be out. None of us would be safe again.

There was only one thing I could do. I sent a message up above. And then I made eye contact with Jake. <Well,> I said in private thought-speak, <it’s been real. Sorry we never had a chance to make it realer.>

His golden tiger eyes bored into mine. <What are you—>

 _TSEEEEEEEER_. With a hawkish scream, Tobias dived in through the open window. The cold press of the beam against the back of my head faltered for just a moment. And I did what any kid trained in fire safety knows how to do: I stopped, dropped, and rolled. Right off the edge of the catwalk.

I’d gotten lucky last time I’d done this: I’d landed on the Kandrona instead of on the power lines. I wasn’t going to be able to do that from the spot I was falling from. I could still have gotten lucky again, if the power lines weren’t live. If the Yeerks were still experimenting with their setup, if they hadn’t made any connections to the actual power grid.

I didn’t get lucky. I felt the lines give and snap, and then I felt the initial fritz as the power found the edges of my body instead. My last thought, as tens of thousands of volts went through me: I should have just said yes to Cassie. At least I’d have a good memory to go out on.

***

I woke up slowly. That was the surprising part, actually: that I woke up. The less surprising part was that every inch of my body hurt. <Urrgh,> I groaned.

“Demorph!” Rachel said.

I looked around. I was on a table in the little operating room on the side of Cassie’s barn. Cassie was standing next to me, holding a syringe and wearing a worried expression. Jake was there, too, and Ax and Tobias, all staring intently at me. <Whaa…>

<You have less than eight minutes remaining in your morph, and your body is severely damaged,> Ax said. <I recommend that you demorph.>

I didn’t need to be told twice. Or, I guess I did. I didn’t need to be told a third time, though. I started to shrink.

It’s weird, how demorphing erases the injuries of battle. Your human body emerges all intact and unbruised, as fresh as when you woke up that morning. But you know the damage was done. You can’t feel the pain anymore, but you know you should. It’s like your mind has been bruised instead of your body.

My undamaged human body emerged from the wreck of the gorilla’s body. My crisped-off fur melted away to lightly haired human skin. My foot emerged from the stump that had been cauterized by Dracon beam. I could breathe again without pain.

I sat up shakily on the edge of the exam table. My voice was shaky but not hoarse. “So, did we do it? Did we win?”

“We destroyed the Kandrona,” Rachel said. “Ax sliced it up like a loaf of bread.”

<You were out for the count,> Tobias said. <Rachel had to carry you back here in elephant morph.>

“There are probably a couple of confused motorists out there,” Rachel admitted.

“We were worried,” Cassie said softly. “We couldn’t get you to wake up.”

“Hey, but you did it,” I said. I didn’t like the worried way they were all looking at me. “One Marco, intact. Good work.”

<In addition, Toby and her allies were able to capture eighteen additional Hork-Bajir,> Ax said. <They have significantly grown their army.>

“Sounds like a win all around, then.” I was distracted by the way Jake was still staring at me, like he was trying to bore holes into my head. “So, home?”

“You should stay,” Jake said. “We aren’t sure you’re okay yet.”

I stretched my arms out in front of me. “Uh, pretty sure demorphing means that I am.”

“Cassie injected a lot of stimulant into your bloodstream,” Jake said. “We need to make sure it’s not still affecting you. The rest of you can go,” he said to Rachel and Tobias and Ax.

“Good,” Rachel said, heading to the door. “My mom expected me home like three hours ago.”

<She’s going to start thinking you have a secret boyfriend or something,> Tobias said, fluttering after her.

I waited until it was just Jake and Cassie and me in the room. Then I said, “You know the thing about stimulant in my bloodstream is crap, right? We’ve totally morphed away from poison before, so—”

Jake took the three steps across the room, put his hands on either side of my face, and kissed me.

Okay. I said earlier that I’d thought about Jake like this once or twice. That might have been a slight underestimate. But nothing I’d come up with in my head held a candle to the actual experience of Jake kissing me. I hadn’t guessed the way my stomach would leap. Or the way his mouth would be so soft and warm on mine that my knees would have given way if I hadn’t been sitting down. Or the way he’d move his tongue and it would scramble my brain worse than ten thousand volts of electricity.

Jake pulled slowly away, leaving his hands on either side of my face. “Argleblargh,” I said. Not my most eloquent pronouncement. It seemed like Jake understood it, though, because he smiled a little and leaned in to kiss me again.

Did I want it to keep going and never, ever stop? Oh, yes. Yes, I did.

“Okay,” Cassie said, “now that is hot.”

Jake broke off the kiss and grinned at her. His lips were shiny with spit. Because I’d just been kissing him. “You want a turn?” he asked her.

“I wouldn’t say no,” she said.

“One sec.” Jake reached over and turned the lock on the door. “Okay, go for it.”

Cassie turned toward me. I hadn’t thought about her this way before, exactly. But I’d thought about her and Jake. And she’s obviously really pretty—especially now, the way she was looking at me. “Can I kiss you?” she asked.

“Uh,” I said. “Um, yeah, definitely. No objections here. Full speed ahead.”

Cassie leaned in and kissed me. I had now been kissed by more people on this one day than I had in my entire life before this.

Her lips were fuller than Jake’s, and surprisingly, she was more daring with her tongue—she slipped it into my mouth right away. She put her hands on my shoulders and kissed me slowly with little swipes of her tongue.

By the time she pulled away, my stomach felt like it was full of bubbles, like a can of soda that had been shaken and left to warm in the sun for a few hours. “Mm,” she said, and the sound fizzed through me, right down to my toes.

I blinked a few times. “So, uh.” I cleared my throat. Tried to clear my heard. “Are we doing this, or…”

“That’s up to you,” Jake said. His voice sounded deeper than usual.

“We don’t have to do anything right now,” Cassie said. “There’s no rush.”

“I mean,” I said “I’m pretty, uh, ready.” I was wearing my morphing outfit. They could probably see how ready I was.

“Still doesn’t mean we have to do anything right now,” Cassie said.

I wondered if there was a casual way to communicate how desperately I wanted both of them to kiss me again, right now. Maybe skywriting.

Jake reached out and snagged my fingers with a couple of his. “What do you want?” he asked.

His fingers curled around mine, casually possessive. “Yeah, I mean, I guess we can do some stuff,” I said. “Not that it has to be right now. But if it was, I wouldn’t, you know, _hate_ it or anything.”

“My parents will be asleep already,” Cassie said.

That hung in the air for a moment.

“Well,” I said. “This just got really real.”

Cassie’s parents must really trust her or something. She’d been out all evening, and the house was totally dark as we walked inside, no one waiting to jump out and yell at us or anything. My dad, on the other hand, was probably calling the cops and preparing a small room in which to ground me until I was at least twenty-five.

I didn’t care. There was room in my brain for exactly one thought, which was: sex. Which I was apparently going to have with two of my best friends.

Maybe the electrocution had scrambled my human brain along with my gorilla one.

By the time we got up to Cassie’s bedroom, I was shivering, even though it was like seventy degrees out. Cassie shut the door behind us. “We really don’t have to do this if you don’t want to,” she said to me.

My teeth were practically chattering. “What if one of you just hurries up and kisses me,” I said.

Cassie stepped into my arms. I was surprised enough that it took me a minute to react, by which point she was kissing me again.

I lifted my arms around her, tentatively. She fit surprisingly well there. Her body was soft against mine. It occurred to me I was probably going to get to touch her, like, everywhere. It was a hard thought to handle, especially when she was kissing me like that.

I kept my eyes closed for a minute after Cassie broke the kiss. “Okay, Jake, now I get why you kept blowing me off to hang out with Cassie.”

Cassie laughed softly, butting her forehead against my chin. “Right?” Jake said. He was standing next to us, and, oh, okay. Shirtless.

It’s not like I’d never seen a naked chest before. I’d even seen Jake’s naked chest before, at the beach or biking on a hot day or whatever. But it’s totally different seeing a naked chest on a platonic friend versus a naked chest you’re maybe going to be allowed to touch. Like, _really_ touch, not just a casual “Oops, was that your skin, and oh by the way did you need any help putting on sunscreen?” touch.

Jake looked uncomfortable. I think. It was pretty dark in Cassie’s room, and anyway I was distracted by staring at his chest like I was hoping to spontaneously develop x-ray vision. Which, come to think of it, was probably the cause of the discomfort. “Is…is this okay?” Jake asked.

“Oh yeah,” I said. “Sorry, my life was just flashing before my eyes, and turns out it all sucked compared to this moment.”

Jake started to look at little pleased. “You could, you know, take your shirt off, too. If you wanted.”

“Yeah, I…” I started to say, and then I trailed off, because my eyes strayed over to Cassie and _breasts_.

You know how breasts look really awesome in all the pictures you see of them? You know how they always look like they’d be amazing to touch? Yeah. Turns out that effect is amplified by, like, ten thousand when you’re looking at them in person.

If my heart beat any harder I was going to need medical intervention. “Okay, this is just, like, an unfair level of collective hotness,” I muttered.

Cassie smiled. “You know,” she said, “the two of us were just talking the other night about how hot _you_ are.”

“You were?” I said in a totally normal voice. Definitely not one that had gone hoarse and weird. Nope.

“When we were talking about doing this,” she said. “Jake told me he’d always thought you were cute.”

I goggled. Then I narrowed my eyes. “Are you just saying this so I won’t feel weird about taking my clothes off?”

Cassie smiled enigmatically. Damn her. Really had to teach her poker one of these days.

Jake said gruffly, “She’s not lying.”

I looked at him. Then I started taking my clothes off.

I hesitated with my thumbs in the waistband of my shorts. Neither of them had taken their underwear off. They were mostly just watching me while I undressed. Or, in Jake’s case, half watching me and half darting his eyes around, uncomfortable, before coming back to look at me some more.

“So,” I blurted out, “I haven’t done this much.”

That seemed to knock Jake out of his stupor. “That’s totally fine,” he said quickly. “Obviously that’s fine. I mean, you shouldn’t even worry about it, it’s…yeah. It’s totally cool.”

Cassie said, “Marco, if you want to wait—”

“No,” I said. Jeez. Why did I have to say anything in the first place? What, was I trying to get them to _not_ have sex with me? How self-sabotaging could I get? “I just…like, you know I like to think about consequences, right? That’s sort of my thing. And it just seems like, we do this, it gets weird, we still have to see each other every day. I mean, the Yeerks are bad enough, don’t need awkwardness on top of it, right? So I guess what I’m saying is, if this is just a random thing we’re doing tonight, maybe we should skip it.”

Okay. That was how self-sabotaging I could get.

I stood there, breathing kind of hard from saying all that in a single breath. I thought about taking it back. Pretending I’d lost my mind for a moment. Because, come on, obviously I wanted to have sex with them. Except what if it was weird afterward? What if Jake wouldn’t look at me again?

Cassie and Jake exchanged a glance, almost too quick to see. Then Cassie reached out and took my hand. “Marco,” she said. “When Jake and I talked about this, it wasn’t just because we wanted to have sex with you.”

“Okay,” I said slowly.

Jake took a step closer. “We both like you a lot,” he said. “I mean, you knew that. But…like, really a lot.”

“Well, that’s good,” I said.

Jake nodded. “I guess what I’m saying is, this can be a lot of things, if you want. But mostly, it can be whatever you want.”

Jake has this way of looking at you, like he’s very serious about what he’s seeing. He doesn’t look at me that way a lot—maybe because I tend to make a joke and break the tension before anything can get too serious. He was looking at me that way now, though, and my throat wasn’t working well enough to speak.

Cassie ran her hand up my arm. “We want what you want,” she said softly.

I swallowed hard. “Does that mean the two of you want me to say something funny to break the tension?”

Jake smiled a crooked smile. “Actually, yeah.”

“Well,” I said, “let me tell you the one about the gorilla who almost died of electric shock, and that somehow led to his two best friends making out with him. They said they really felt…sparks fly.”

Cassie groaned. Jake grinned. “Yeah,” he said, taking my face in his hands again and tipping me back onto Cassie’s bed. “That was exactly what I wanted.”

He kissed me. The bed dipped as Cassie climbed up next to us, laughing softly. And then…

Well. I don’t want to say too much. As you know, the life of an Animorph has to involve some secrecy. Let’s just say…the next time I had a near-death experience, I was going to have a better last memory to dwell on. And maybe, if things went well, a whole bunch of them.


End file.
